"He's a louse.
"He's almost family.
"He's some kind of poor relation to your former mother- in-law, yes, and that's Mob family. Those people are criminals. Drug pushers. Arm breakers. Murderers.
She laughed good-humoredly and pecked my cheek. "Dougie never murdered anybody, Jay, except maybe a few women he loved to death. But you're right. I shouldn't let him think he's being encouraged. And I won't.
So for six months I saw nothing of Dougie d'Agasto, but long before that he'd written both May and Jefferson most abject letters of apology. Jeff relented-he didn't ask my advice. Then Betsy came over for a party, and she brought d'Agasto with her.
We were competing in earnest then, and actually the visit was partly so that we could talk over some business. There's a lot of ocean, but only narrow bands of it, and short, where the temperature difference between surface and chilly deep is enough to run the turbines at full speed. We both were sticking pretty close to the equator, too. It wasn't so much for the solar heat, although there was plenty there. It was for protection from the storms. Our boats were getting a lot too big and clumsy to risk in a hurricane. You don't get hurricanes on the equator, or anyway very rarely. The equator isn't north and it isn't south, so there's no Coriolis force to speak of. The funnel doesn't know which way to turn, so the big funnel storms don't develop there.
So more often than not the ocean wasn't empty anymore. There were other oaty-boats in sight, often ours, more often hers--or Russians or Japanese or Norwegians. The time was coming just beyond the horizon when there might be more grazers than forage for OTECs. So there was some high-powered arguing between Betsy's nav chiefs and ours before the party started, and I can't honestly say the question ever really got resolved. Still, the guests had a good time at the party. It was New Year's Eve, and we'd given everybody any time off that could be spared at all. The guests were all over the boat, the crews were welcomed in owners' country; I saw Betsy and May singing "Auld Lang Syne with the kitchen staff and Dougie d'Agasto slapping the back of an assistant pipe fitter, and if we were out to cut each others' throats in the marketplace as soon as the party was over, the swords were sheathed while it lasted. And the next morning, while most of the ship was nursing hangovers, Jefferson Ormondo was inspecting intake gauges on a hydrogen freezer-ship line.
There was a leak. Any leak was dangerous, but it shouldn't have been a disaster for two reasons. The first reason was that hydrogen in the open floats quickly up and away. Anyway, as soon as they heard the shriek of escaping gas, Jefferson and every body else broke for the rail-it was only a twenty-meter drop, and the water in the moat was calm and warm. The second reason was that there was no reason for a spark to ignite it. Nothing that could make a spark was ever on a hydrogen ship's intake stage.
Except this time. I had guarded the wrong member of the family.
Even if there had been an explosion within a few meters of jeff, he should have survived. But he was within the explosion. He was inside a mass of mixed hydrogen and air, and the same mixture was inside his lungs. When the explosion came, it exploded outside him and in. He lived an hour. The whole time he kept trying to scream in agony, but he hadn't lung enough left to scream with anymore.
The only damage to the oaty-boat was some scorched paint and a few fittings. That didn't matter to May. She didn't want to live on it anymore. Jimmy Rex needed a good school, she said, and so she was taking him and herself off to live in Florida. What it was that May needed I only guessed. Did not want to guess. Could not helping guessing when, a few months later, she phoned me and said, "I have news for you, Uncle Jay.
That sweet, sad face on the phone, it melted my heart. All I said was, "Who's the lucky man?
Pause. "Please don't say anything against him when I tell you, promise?
My mouth was dry and my heart was pounding, but I managed to smile. "It's Dougic d'Agasto, right? And you've made up your mind?
"I have, dear Jay. He's a nicer man than you think he is.
"I hope so.
"Oh, Jay, please! Try to see it my way. I married one husband because Ben insisted, and another because I needed his help. This one's for me, Jay. Please say it's all right!
"May, I said to my lifelong love, "whatever you do is all right with me, always. Twice a widow at her age-- could I blame her?
No. It was easier to blame myself. And bastard Ben had been right. He said she would marry a rich boy and a sensible boy and a handsome boy. He never said they would all be the same man.
Consort the first was slow to learn. Consort the second was quick to burn. The higher her worth, the meaner her fall, And consort the third was the worst of them all. Sweet Truth despises and high Honor reviles The last man to king the queen of the isles.
They made their home in Miami. Miami! I could not imagine how my May could be happy among land people, especially those land people, but her letters were cheerful enough. They were short, yes, and infrequent. But the only news they ever contained was good. Dougie, she wanted me to know, had buckled down and was studying ocean-thermal engineering! It was too bad that it kept him away from home so much, but he was very clever at learning it. May herself was swimming, golfing, riding- always busy. And Jimmy Rex was happy to be back in his school. There was no word of whether the school was happy to have him. So there was some kind of a bright side for me. If I didn't have May, at least I didn't have Jimmy Rex, either.
So owner's country was all mine, and I rattled around in it lonesomely. I was in no mood for parties, and if Betsy wanted to be invited, she had the good sense not to tell me so. I kept busy. We were in a dozen big industries by then. We were selling liquid gases-oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen; solid CO2 ammonia, methanol, chlorine, caustic soda; small quantities of argon and helium, too, when we could find anyone to buy them. I was toying with the idea of microwaving energy to a low satellite and beaming it back to, say. Australia or Japan. Betsy's steel industry wasn't going anywhere, but I'd taken a tip from what Captain Havrila had said about the ships coming in in ballast: I had ours syphon sand up from the port bottoms for ballast, and then we used the sand to make a slurry to scour out the fouling organisms in our deep intake pipes-no need to try to recover it! Of course, I wasn't the owner of the Fleet, and everything I did I had to ask permission of May for. But she gave it, every time. Because I had plenty to do, I should have been happy- or as happy as I could be expected to be, with my May married to a rodent that walked like a man. If I wasn't happy, part of the reason was that I got the letter I had been expecting for weeks. No return address. No name. Just the message:
The Commodore's orders are still in effect. I didn't know whether it was time for me to carry them out or not, so I flipped a coin. You won this time.
I almost wished the coin had come up the other way- better, I wished that my unknown pen pal would come and talk to me about it. If he decided to kill me afterward, well-I didn't want him to, but there were some bad nights when it seemed like a way out of a place where I didn't want to be. But God knew I needed advice-even from my assassin.
And then May's weekly letter said, "Please come and visit us, and enclosed with it was one from Dougie d'Agasto:
We have some important business to talk over, Jason. You'll come out of it rich. Besides, it's what May wants.
Even when the man was trying to be ingratiating he raised the hackles on the back of my neck. I had not forgotten the last deal he had offered me! I did not for one second think that he wouldn't have made the same offer again-except that he'd found a better one for himself. You don't have to steal the child when you can capture the mother.